Teaching Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 72

vertices. Students are instructed to make their graph drawing as aesthetically
pleasing as possible. When all the drawings are submitted, students view all the
different efforts and vote to select the best ones. In class discussion, students
explain why they voted as they did, and this can lead to a discussion of graph
drawing metrics, e.g., that edge crossings and bends have a negative effect on
aesthetic quality, etc. Such metrics are the basis of graph drawing algorithms
that could be analyzed by the students in a second step.

Grading of Practical Exercises: One can classify the described approaches
for practical exercises into two main groups:

1. implementation of a specific technique or implementation of a visualization
to solve a specific problem, and
2. examination of the usefulness of a given tool or visualization approach, such
as a commercial visualization system or graph drawing metrics, etc.

Grading of assignments of the first type can based on the overall quality of the
implementation itself, i.e., the instructor and/or TA evaluate the needed time,
aesthetic aspects, level of effort (complexity), usability, and capability provided
by the tool to get more insight about the chosen data set. Both types of assign-
ments can be combined with an oral presentation in the classroom. In this case,
the quality of the presented slides, lecture style, originality, and the presentation
quality itself can be used to evaluate presentation skills if these are intended
learning outcomes—and it is increasingly acknowledge as desirable to incorpo-
rate the teaching and learning of skills into the subject-area curriculum rather
than dealing with this independently. The survey yielded one interesting case in
which the students themselves voted on the best presentation(s).

2.4 Examination

More than the half (63%) of the surveyed courses had examinations of some
kind. The most common form was a written exam (37%), particularly in the
United States, but a notable portion (21%) used oral exams and 5% used both.
Oral examinations were used in Europe only, where there is a tradition of oral
examination for advanced level courses.
The survey also gave some insight into the different kinds of typical exam
questions (Q4a[ii]). There are a lot of different variants; a selection of the most
asked questions includes:

- Explain technique .

- Given is a concrete problem and a task to be fulfilled. Which technique would
you use?
- Compare technique X with technique Y .
- Explain the construction of a Treemap, Starplot, Circle Segments, ...
- What are the advantages/disadvantages of technique

X for the visualization of problem Y

X ?

- What is a preattentive feature?
- What are the principles of using color?